For the second assignment of Rest of you we had to make or use) two sensors, an outward pointing one, and an inward pointing one, and log their output for as long as possible.

My outward pointing sensor was to draw every night the things I see right before falling asleep. It is a stretch to say that these things are outward pointing, but they are perceived as being exterior.

The inward pointing sensor was a heart sensor made from an led, a resistor and a ldsr affecting a recorded piece of music (The Age of Aquarius), this is then broadcast to 88.1 fm, from whence anyone in a range of 100 meters can tune in and record the audio, thus creating a log. I futzed around with this combination until the ldsr had enough variance from the light changing around my finger (theoretically the blood flowing in and out) to be noticeable by the human ear as rythmic. I think that an interesting and noticeable effect has been achieved, but I need a professional grade heart sensing device to pit my data against to be sure that that is the information we are hearing and not the projections of our own desires to believe.

a) Create a musical instrument using any material or technique you like.

b) Prepare a one minute performance to played in class

I created a heart rate sensor with an led and an ldsr. Since the ldsr is a variable resistor I used it to modulate the speed at which a sample from a greeting card is played. I then made this into a custom wearable out of shapelock (the heart sensor sits around my thumb), and routed the output of the wearable to fm frequency 88.1. You can now listen to my heart, modulating the intro of The Age of Aquarius (it sounds like noise music, the song itself is rarely recognizable) if you are within 100 feet of my body.

Pictures and performance documentation coming shortly.

Assignment 2 was ”Inspirational Sounds”: Bring a one minute audio clip of music it to share with the class. This can be music that you use for a specific purpose or task, or it can simply be music that you find compelling. Most importantly, be prepared to explain why you find this music inspiring. Try to identify the qualities that appeal to you or that make it well suited to the purpose for which you use it.

A one minute audio clip is a tall order. Inspiration in audio comes through the time spent with it, and one minute is hardly any time at all considering the amount of audio the average person, not to mention one infatuated with audio listens to and takes pleasure from.

We managed to parse incoming emails from the gmail account. Almost managed to send that out to leds representing solenoids on the typewriter’s keys (we only seem to be able to send the first one out). We ordered solenoids! That up next!

On the future of the evolution of the piece;

If there is a mechanical object, that receives messages from the ether, If the object could vocalize itself, what would it say on the subject?

My fantasy device would be to listen to the radio station of another person’s brain. Like if my friend’s brains were hooked up to some NamJune Paik sculptures. The sculptures being in my house and my friends being all over the world.

Then I finally worked out the kinks for running the vibe motors on the puppet costume for this project.

So that when the user goes from left to right, their pulsating decreases towards the middle. So the more left the user turns the knob, the stronger the leftmost vibe motors will pulsate, as the knob is moved towards the middle the leftmost vibe motors pulsate less, until they grind to a halt and the right most ones start grinding to a start, the more to the right the knob is turned the more the rightmost ones will pulsate. Yay! Since vibe motors and led’s are both digital out that depend only on the presence of current for their pulsating, I used leds for the test. Link to video.

What I don’t understand is why I had to have the led’s pulse HIGH to keep them from turning on?

Here is the first lab from ITP’s physical computing class. I won’t document it in detail as it is something that is thoroughly documented here. All I can say is my life is so consistently a mess of electronic guts on a table dangerously close to a coffee cup.